


When Everything Fell (We'd be Held)

by TwentyoneTwelve



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Hands, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 22:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11022987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwentyoneTwelve/pseuds/TwentyoneTwelve
Summary: the result of a tumblr prompt by Minutia-R: Queen Thief/Minister of War and "Held"





	When Everything Fell (We'd be Held)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



 Her hands were slender, the fingers lithe. His had always been broad of palm, joints thickened from the bruising impact of training weapons. Hers interlaced with his without space or hesitation, like the gears their eldest son cast. Like their handclasps, those gears had first been large, the teeth ill-fitting, but with time and confidence they grew ever smaller and capable of more complicated windings.

His hands were always warm, ridged with old scars. Her callouses caught people by surprise, expecting the soft palms that the jewel-clad wrists and shaped nails promised. He could fashion a pulley line in a pitch-black mountain night, and she had challenged him to braid her hair. When she had been forced to stay abed, their daughters had lined up each morning for his rough brush strokes and simple braids. He had tied their curls into loops for the funerary rites.

She could tie complicated knots and fashion a rope fine enough it was a shadow against a wall. He had loved to watch her, sewing a prayer into each seam of the gowns she had made their impossibly tiny third son, each embroidered feather an invocation.

When they walked, whether on the street or the high balconies and ramparts of the palace, they had been hand in hand. From the first steps of their first square dance – him breathless and blushing, her fearless and fae – he had been the rock and she had been the cloud. Her father chided her for letting him restrain her. His expressed disappointment that he would marry someone who dragged him from the narrow way. They danced together, and neither looked for the edge of the roof.

Their fingertips touched each time they passed in the halls. His eyes were on the ground as he taught a grieving girl to find strength in stone. She looked upward, teeth flashing as their son leapt from one balcony to another. He found his cloak unevenly fastened, his pin replaced with one of her earrings.

His fingers brushed over her lips as he raised their entwined hands to his mouth. Hers were cold, the pads roughened and torn. There was no answering tightening of her grip. His were ink stained, the muscles aching from hours with quill and paper. Another crisis of Sounis’ making on another moonlit night where the dew made the slates glitter and the breeze made her braids dance more wildly than she. He felt her fingers warm with the heat of his grip, an answering tremble waking in his own. She would not fall, He would not be drowned in the mud of a hundred battle fields, not as long as they could hold each other.

**Author's Note:**

> In honour of Queen's Thief Appreciation Week, and to save/maybe get a bigger audience on this story.   
> I love these two, and would love to write some more about them. Feel free to send me some prompts either here or @ewokshootsfirst  
> Title is from Nicole Nordeman's song "Held"...This is what it means to be held/How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life/And you survive/This is what it is to be loved and to know/that the promise was/when everything fell/we'd be held


End file.
